FEEDING ON OTHERNESS

It often happens to us, almost every day and several times a day, that we eat without thinking at all about what we are doing, except sometimes to choose the foods we like. Yet eating - an act that is so habitual and habitualized as to become almost automatic - is one of the most implicit and meaningful activities that human beings are capable of performing. Like many other animals, we feed ourselves by introducing food substances into our mouths, chewing and swallowing. So nourishment comes from outside: it implies crossing the border between what is 'other' than the body and its deepest intimacy. It is not only a matter of crossing boundaries, or several boundaries, between the outside and the inside, but also of subjecting the 'other' to intense, often prolonged and obscure processes of metabolisation (transformation, assimilation, discarding). However, human beings do not simply introduce substances from outside: the 'other' is subjected to selection and preventive treatment, which most often takes the form of cooking - a sign, as much as anything else, of the culture typical of humanity.
The strong symbolic value of organic food lends itself very well to interpreting the social relations in which human beings are embedded in terms of nutrition. Homo sapiens, as a profoundly social animal, needs social support and cultural nourishment, which can come to him from his 'peers': communication, sharing, assimilation are indispensable moments in the formation of human beings in society (anthropo-poiesis).
Here the 'others' are our 'fellow human beings'. But however closed or open societies may be, every society knows a stronger otherness on the outside (and sometimes on the inside): that of others, often understood as enemies. On this point, it is as if societies are at a crossroads, depending on whether they interpret themselves and their culture in terms of completeness or incompleteness.